December 21, 2012

Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?

Salacious One of the best parts of Bioshock was finding the relics of what the city had once been and exploring the path that it had gone down toward its ultimate collapse. Will Bioshock Infinite have the same type of hidden backstory for Columbia?

IGken Yes, but the backstory won't be about a collapse, because when you get there, the city is very much alive and kicking. I don't want to spoil anything, but I will say the past matters in a very serious way in this game. Shawn Elliott said that where the last game was about Archeology, this game is also about Anthropology, in other words, you get stories from both the living and the dead in Infinite.

BioShock is not only inspired by the theory of Objectivism that Ayn Rand developed and championed in her written works--and famously fictionalized in her novel Atlas Shrugged--but the game's narrative also functions chiefly as a frightening critique of a society shaped in the image of her political and economic beliefs. Andrew Ryan’s underwater city of Rapture (the name itself used as a double-entendre for both the height of pleasure and the biblical apocalypse) offers the player a visceral demonstration of the pitfalls of what Rand called “rational self-interest” merged with a dystopian alternate history science fiction epic.